How to Clean Your Instagram Feed – Minimalist’s Method

19 July 2017

Are social media bad? Good? The Minimalists (Ryan and Joshua) would say that social media are tools like a knife. What use you’ll make of them is up to you. I would say that like in most spheres of our lives, we should find our golden mean between radical attitudes. If you can get any benefit (even inspiration or pleasure) that you need, keep your profiles or feeds alive. Just don’t touch the point where you live only in your apps or misperceive their content (like chasing a perfect look, perfect outfits, perfect homes, and clean kids).

I started to like Instagram. And I’m a person who never fell in love with Facebook or got addicted to Twitter.

I like a little bit of contact with people on Instagram and I like some nice photos. Instagram can be very powerful and inspiring when you want to make a lifestyle change (I’m taking part in Tammy Strobel’s #EverydayAdventures2017). We can follow for example zero waste or vegan profiles or we can post our progress and challenges results. That’s the reasons why I want to keep Instagram on my phone and in my life.

Instagram. But a minimalist, reasonable one. Not the one being only addiction and distraction.

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How to clean your Instagram feed?

Method 1. Minimalist and radical

You can just unfollow all profiles that you’ve followed in the past.

And when you’ll follow 0, then think of whose profiles you find valuable. Probably you remember some people whose photos had meaning to you. Find them and follow again.

Method 2. A bit inefficient

You can also do it while reading your feed. Every time when you see a photo that isn’t interesting for you, go to the person’s profile and review it.

If you find value in their photos and only the last one was worse, you can keep following this profile. But if most of the recent photos of that person have no value to you, unfollow. And do this check by every uninteresting or stupid photo, you see on your Instagram.

Why is this method inefficient?

You unfollow profiles that are the most active because their photos are what you see in your feed. But this way you probably won’t ever really clean your Instagram because you won’t check inactive profiles. They will still be in your number of following.

Method 3. (that I use) Minimalist and gentle

After thinking about the first, radical method and trying the second one, I discovered a good method for me to make my Instagram a clean tool again.

How to start Instagram feed cleaning?

Step one: go to the Instagram app and click to see your profile.

Step two: click on the number of profiles you follow.

Then you see the list of all profiles you follow.

Step three: And go one after one, asking yourself, WHY you follow this person. You must have the answer for this question to every profile you follow.If you cannot find the answer – the reason to keep seeing this types of pictures, I unfollow.

If you cannot find the answer – the reason to keep seeing this types of pictures, unfollow.

Using this method I went from about 480 to about 380 following in a few days. It’s a slow way but it makes using Instagram much more pleasant and reasonable, so it’s worth the time.

Exemplary reasons WHY you can follow someone on social media:

– You know the person personally or know the person from the Internet and want to know what he or she is doing and thinking.

– You get inspired by the profile to do better: to work towards fulfilling your dreams, to lose weight, to be more eco-friendly, to eat better.

– You learn from the person: travel tips that you’ll really use in a near future, tips to live zero waste, following someone’s successful path.

One example WHY NOT to follow someone:

What I recently discovered in my behavior is that… I should unfollow my favorite bloggers on Instagram! I made the observation that when I keep seeing photos from a blogger, I feel like being in touch with them and I don’t go to their blog! And the blog was the reason why I started following this person. So forgetting to read good articles that made me like this person because of seeing their photos is… just senseless!